Frank Greenall: Medical cannabis logic astounds

DEBATE: The debate continues over medical cannabis.PHOTO/FILE

THE HYPOCRISY surrounding the medical cannabis debate knows no bounds.

Our hospitals and pharmacies are awash with all manner of upper-class, heavy-duty drug derivatives and synthetics administered and imbibed on a daily basis - opiate cousins such as morphines, codeines and so forth. And, by and large, all are doing a good job medically, mitigating and palliating. Yet let someone in extremis, for whom these substances are not proving suitable, request pain relief of a slightly different ilk which better suits their neuro-physiology, then it's man the barricades - a rabid potential dope fiend is on the loose.

I'm not sure what level of logic is used by opponents of cannabis-based palliation to justify their often vehement objection when they have no qualms whatsoever about being grateful recipients of the odd spot of morphia-like relief themselves. Is it because the sufferer might inadvertently also experience a - God forbid - smidgen of pleasure? Surely that can't be it. There are already abundant accounts of patients blissfully swooning under the influence of opioid-induced euphorias - yea, even to the extent that it was all so pleasurable they compulsively keep going back for more.

In the days when GPs often kept a few grains of morphine in the surgery safe, many is the doctor who self-medicated as an occasional pick-me-up but eventually succumbed to its beguiling (so I'm told) charms, eventually having to be despatched to the local sanatorium for a "rest". Ditto even the patient in the dentist's chair who has had a hit of the old nitrous oxide - the apparently appropriately nicknamed "laughing gas".

It's no accident, too, why chemists are periodically targeted by individuals seeking untoward quantities of codeine-based analgesics with which to do a spot of home baking unlike grandma ever did. They're doing it because they crave an occasional tasty cookie and never mind the after-effects. And let's not start on fiends who anoint themselves daily in the liquid legal drug that underpins all manner of mass carnage and public and domestic dysfunction throughout the land - our friend Al Cohol. Politicians by and large can't get enough of good old Al. They fight tooth and nail against any threat to his right to be openly flogged off in any neighbourhood at any hour. Until recently, one of Al's poster boy logos was openly displayed on the jerseys of the rugby team that's meant to most define us a nation.

The really successful public pushers of this drug we even laud with knighthoods - Sir Henry Kelliher and Sir Douglas Myers please take a bow. If the violence and mayhem fuelled by this truly demon drug was perpetrated in the name of, say, one of the opiates, somehow it doesn't require a major exercise of the imagination to envisage a public outrage tsunami. Yet we not only tolerate it but actively promote it. Speaking of highly addictive drugs, anyone for a fag?

Perhaps many of the politicians are themselves a bit befuddled on the logic stakes, given their own propensity for the old gargle. Bellamy's may not be quite be the slosh trough of yore, but check out the liquid drug stash in every Minister of the Crown's private office. The poster boy in this regard, of course, was the great socialist Sir Robert Muldoon, best illustrated when he staggered out of his caucus room to announce the 1984 snap election. When asked if the scheduled date offered enough time to adequately prepare, his phonetically plastic response is now the stuff of history: "Doeshn't give our opponents mush time (hic) either!" A sobering thought that this legal doper was our prime minister.

Which brings us back to the matter of wilfully denying someone in extremis or serial pain the palliative that best suits them. You know, I can't honestly figure it out. Can you? If so, please let us all know how you logically manage to leapfrog all the other heavy-duty legal drug palliation that gets you there.